The New Spymasters (32 page)

At that time, a stranger like Humam who arrived in the tribal zone was in mortal danger. The locals were consumed by spy fever. Night and day, the American drones were criss-crossing the sky, hunting for new targets among the militants. The planes were said to hunt in packs, monitoring a potential target from multiple angles and remaining on station overhead. Such total surveillance was known by the US military as the ‘Unblinking Eye'.
23
Drones were usually invisible, blending into the grey skies. But people on the ground could sometimes catch a glimpse of the planes when cloud cover forced them to fly lower than usual, and more often they could hear the hum of the propellers. The sound could be terrifying, particularly for those who got mixed up with militants.

None of the locals understood how the drones found their targets. They appeared to be highly accurate. Contrary to what US officials sometimes said, they did kill plenty of innocents. By and large, these were people who were standing close to a missile's intended target. The more accurate the drones became, the more desperate the hunt for spies. The CIA offered big rewards for the scalps of top militants, whose henchmen in turn started rounding up suspected informers, torturing them to extract ‘confessions' and then executing them in public as a warning (and sometimes recording it all on gruesome videos). They were hunting too for little electronic homing beacons, which were believed to be tossed over the walls of militant compounds by informers and supposedly guided the drones to their targets.

How had the CIA improved its targeting? With reportedly up to 200 officers deployed to Pakistan, was it the result of running spies in the region? According to one person involved, the CIA had some agents but there was little that US intelligence could do in the tribal areas without running into the ISI. Much of what passed for ‘human intelligence' was just small, imprecise snatches of information passed on by the ISI. Some informants did come forward to offer specific information. But, as they operated in such remote areas, it was hard to confirm what they reported with a second pair of eyes. By contrast, the technical methods used by the CIA were getting better and better. Mobile phones could be intercepted and tracked. The militants knew this but, for some fatalistic reason, still continued to use them. Vehicles and compounds could be watched from above. But what really counted was the US presence over the border in Afghanistan. Because so many militants in that country were also operating in Pakistan, when they were captured they could provide detailed knowledge about the tribal areas. It had taken a very long time, but gradually the CIA had assembled a voluminous database of who was who and what normal life looked like on the frontier (mirroring the laborious work once done in Empire days by British political agents and recorded in huge bound volumes). It had reached the point that the CIA knew almost all the key compounds where the militants lived.

The war was also becoming even more ruthless, as when, in April, the CIA killed a militant early one day and then in the afternoon hit those who were gathered at his funeral. The targets had been top followers of Baitullah Mehsud. Late in August, the US finally got Mehsud. He was on the roof of a building with his wife when a missile struck. As an example of their precision, CIA sources would later claim that they had made such a careful choice of munitions that they hit the roof and killed Mehsud and his wife without collapsing the building.
24

*   *   *

As suddenly as he had vanished, Humam then reappeared. Some said he had been living with Baitullah Mehsud until the commander's death, acting as his personal doctor. No one really knew where he had been. But what Ali bin Zeid saw in his email inbox one morning sent a shiver through him. Attached to a message was a video clip showing that Humam was not just alive but that he had stayed true to his mission and had managed to penetrate the inner circle of al-Qaeda. On the clip was a figure close to Osama bin Laden named Atiyah Adb al-Rahman, a Libyan and fellow veteran of the 2001 Battle of Tora Bora, when the al-Qaeda leader had escaped encirclement by US Special Forces and their local allies. According to intelligence sources interviewed by Joby Warrick, a
Washington Post
journalist who wrote a book about the case, al-Rahman could be seen next to Humam.

Agent or traitor, Humam was no longer just a dangle, a long-shot play at getting someone inside al-Qaeda. Without doubt he had now entered the game as a real player. The news woke up the GID with a jolt. It woke up the CIA too. Bin Zeid and his buddy LaBonte had a live one, a fish on their line.

‘The bait fell in the right spot,' Humam recalled, ‘and they went head over heels with excitement.'
25
Humam would come to say his initial disappearance had all been a ruse. ‘The fact is, after consulting with the Mujahedeen, I cut off ties for four months in order for Jordanian intelligence to stew in its own juices thinking that this guy had abandoned it, so that if he came back to them and told them that conditions were difficult, they would buy his story quickly. And that's what happened.'
26

In September 2009, Humam gave an interview to al-Qaeda's
Vanguards of Khorasan
online magazine. He was introduced as ‘Brother Abu Dujanah al-Khorasani' and described as a ‘Well-Known Blogger in Jihadi Forums, and a Newcomer to the Land of Khorasan'.
27
Ironically, what he told the magazine was pleasing to both sides of the spy game: his handlers in Jordan would observe him maintaining his cover story; his global jihadi readers would receive inspiration. Asked about his background, Humam lied: ‘Your young brother comes from the northern Arabian Peninsula [Saudi Arabia], may Allah release it from its state of imprisonment.' He then added truthfully, ‘I am a little over 30 years old. I'm married and I have two young daughters, praise be to Allah. Allow me to give this much information.' As always, Humam spoke lyrically about jihad:

A person once said, ‘there is love that kills.' I only see the truth of this in my love for jihad, as this love will either kill you with regret if you should choose to stay away from jihad, or else you will die as a martyr for the cause of Allah if you choose to go to jihad – and it is up to every human to choose between these two fates.

Humam said he felt ‘newly born' living in the mountains. He was ‘happy like an innocent child playing with a friend'. But fighters with him had good friends who had already been martyred.

I have learned from them that silence is clearer than speech. This is a group, half of whom are in Paradise and the other half is still on earth waiting. I wonder why do they not cry in front of me when they mention their martyred brothers? If I should mention the name of a martyr before them; of those known to them, you would find the tears frozen in their eyes like a drizzle on a flower.
28

Humam started emailing regular reports to Jordan. He kept it brief and usually vague, but gave details of the effects of drone attacks in the frontier territory. He even suggested a specific target for another air strike. He said later it was all a trick: ‘I gave them some erroneous, made-up coordinates of targets to make them drool even more, along with some worthless or incorrect information. For example, if the Mujahideen had some work to do somewhere, I would tell them that it was in another place, thereby providing cover for the Mujahideen.'
29

If by then he really had been turned so that he was working for al-Qaeda and had betrayed the GID, Humam was using what amounted to classic counterintelligence ploys: namely, giving away what he said were snatches of seemingly important ‘accurate information which we thought the enemy probably already had knowledge of'.
30
His trick recalled the CIA's guidance on Soviet techniques: ‘To create or enhance confidence in an important double agent they are willing to sacrifice through him information of sufficient value to mislead the reacting service into accepting his bona fides.'
31

In October, Humam offered some momentous news. He had a new patient, none other than the deputy leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri. To prove it, he provided the GIA with some specific medical details that had never been made public before. All of a sudden, Humam's status was ratcheted up several notches – from being a Jordanian who was maybe of some importance, he rapidly became possibly the best agent on the ground. The CIA wanted to take over the case. Like Curveball, he was becoming a top source handled by another agency. And if the CIA were to have direct control they would need to meet him.

At this stage, even before the meeting had taken place, the White House was informed. It was a measure of just how rare and important this situation was, and further indication that the CIA was still searching for their ‘man on the rock'. ‘In the eight years since the start of the war against al-Qaeda, no one had ever gotten so close,' said Warrick.
32

Leon Panetta, the CIA director, told President Obama, ‘There are indications that he might have access to Zawahiri … If we can meet with him and give him the right technology, we have a chance to go after Zawahiri.'
33

The Jordanians were proud. ‘You've lifted our heads!' wrote bin Zeid to Humam. ‘You've lifted our heads in front of the Americans.'
34

*   *   *

In its 1963 guidance, the CIA spelled out a warning about inheriting a double agent case from an ally:

Sometimes a double agent operation is turned over by a liaison service … When such a transfer is to be made, the inheriting service ought to delve into the true origins of the case and acquire as much information as possible about its earlier history … For predictive purposes the most important clue embedded in the origins of an operation is the agent's original or primary affiliation, whether it was formed voluntarily or not, the length of its duration, and its intensity.
35

The guidance said double agents fell into three categories: first, the ‘Walk-in or Talk-in'; second, the ‘Agent Detected and Doubled'; and third, the ‘Provocation Agent'. Humam fell into the second category. ‘A service discovering an adversary agent may offer him employment as a double. His agreement, obtained under open or implied duress, is unlikely, however, to be accompanied by a genuine switch of loyalties,' it stated. Such an agent ran the risk of his duplicity being discovered and at that point he would be ‘re-doubled' (also known as becoming a triple agent).

*   *   *

In early December 2009, Ali bin Zeid and Darren LaBonte left for what they hoped would be a short trip to the Afghan border to meet their star agent. Due to the difficulties involved and the importance of the operation, the Jordanians had now agreed to let the Americans take charge.

The destination was Camp Chapman, a CIA and US Special Forces' base by the city airport of Khost, eastern Afghanistan. Khost was a perfect place for spy work. It lay opposite the Taliban's sanctuaries in the Pakistani frontier ‘agencies' of North and South Waziristan. Agents could be dispatched easily over the border because local Pashtuns needed no passport and also because of the physical geography: although Khost was in Afghanistan, the big mountain crossings lay to the west, on the road to Kabul; the passes into Pakistan were relatively low-level and easy to cross. Khost was also a key place where frontier people came to shop and trade. This gave anyone in Waziristan a believable excuse to pay a visit. The currency used in Khost market was the Pakistani rupee and not the afghani.

Camp Chapman itself was, by late 2009, at the centre of a huge spying operation overlooking the border. No fewer than five different sub-bases nearby were controlled by the CIA, which the military referred to as the OGA (Other Government Agency).
36
Inside the bases was an array of listening gear to intercept any kind of electronic message that militants across the border might generate. The bases were also there to prevent or monitor the militants crossing. For that, the CIA had raised its own private army, the Khost Protection Force (KPF), one of a number of militias across the country which it dubbed Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams (CPTs). According to media reports, the CPTs not only guarded the border but also sent operatives across it on raids.
37
That was an exaggeration, according to two officers of the KPF I interviewed, but given their contacts with tribes that spanned the border, the KPF was certainly a tremendous source of gossip and low-level intelligence.

Camp Chapman was technically a CIA ‘sub-station', subordinate to the main Kabul ‘station'. The person in charge of all CIA activities in the area since around April that year was called Jennifer Matthews, a former analyst with the CIA's bin Laden unit (which was known as Alec Station). She was someone skilled in the main mission here: targeting the enemy. Matthews had been credited with tracking down and capturing Abu Zubaydah, the al-Qaeda logistics chief that Nasiri had met. Since then she had worked extensively on the wider al-Qaeda manhunt and been posted to London as chief of counterterrorism liaison with Britain's MI5. What she lacked, however, as LaBonte and bin Zeid would discover, was experience in arranging or conducting a meeting with a secret agent. She had all the skills required for the job, except this most critical one. She was not a spymaster.